VISIMO to build Software for Deepfake Detection through Air Force STTR Award

PITTSBURGH, July 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VISIMO, in partnership with experts at Florida State University, has won an Air Force Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award to develop novel technologies for deepfake detection and prevention.

Deepfake technology is continually advancing, and VISIMO is working with the Air Force to build Aletheia – a software named for the Greek goddess of truth, discovery, and disclosure. Aletheia will increase the types and amount of deepfakes detected in comparison to existing models, and will identify the source of deepfakes by analyzing digital fingerprints found in fake audio, images, and video.

Deepfakes are considered a national security issue by the Department of Defense (DoD), due to an increased reliance on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), which can be easily manipulated.

Adversaries have most notoriously used deepfakes in attempts to influence elections and even foreign policy between countries, but the potential for deepfake attacks goes further.

"We've long understood that deepfakes can influence human beliefs and behavior," said James Julius, President and CEO of VISIMO. "But what about technology that is trained on biased data? If DoD algorithms are unknowingly trained on manipulated data, that poses a significant threat to national security."

For example, adversarial manipulation of data could cause a targeting algorithm to misclassify or ignore an enemy target, if the manipulated training set taught it to do so. 

Aletheia builds from a variety of models designed in the race to stop deepfakes. Aletheia combines several models through ensemble methods of machine learning, and is designed to produce a single, optimal output.

"To our knowledge, no one has previously combined this set of models into an ensemble, nor included a metaclassifier for source identification," said Dino Mintas, Vice President of Data Science and Software Design at VISIMO. "Through Aletheia, we will increase the percentage of deepfakes identified, and detect their origin so we can attack this problem at its source."

Aletheia is the third Air Force STTR awarded to VISIMO in the past year. Other innovative technologies include a conditional adversarial network (CGAN) for synthetic data generation, and sense and avoid architectures for drones.

"We're proud that after just over a year pursuing federal opportunities, that the Air Force continues to see value in the VISIMO team and the outstanding technology we're producing," said Julius. "Aletheia and our other STTR projects will improve people's lives, and that's our ultimate goal."

This material is based upon work supported by the United States Air Force AFRL/SBRK under Contract No. FA864921P1396. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force AFRL/SBRK.

Contact:

Alexander Heit
Vice President, Partnerships & Strategy at VISIMO
O) 412.615.4372
[email protected]
SOURCE VISIMO

SOURCE VISIMO

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